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Authors: Leonardo Padura
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pleasure of confessing it, that in that moment, seeing her as she set off rescued by the very incarnation of what she most disdained, he had ceased to be a child. He was convinced that his mother was right: if one truly wanted to be free, one had to do something to change that filthy world that wounded people’s dignity. Very soon, Ramón would also learn that change would only come about if many embraced the same flag and, elbow to elbow, fought for it. The revolution had to be made.
4
“Today’s petrified crap . . .” Lev Davidovich threw the newspaper against the wall and left his study. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the scent of goat stew that Natalia was preparing for dinner, and that appetizing aroma seemed obscene. Behind his desk he contemplated the beautiful Sara Weber, who was typing with a speed that at that moment seemed automatic, definitively inhuman. He crossed the door to the barren garden and the Turkish policemen smiled at him, willing to follow him, and he stopped them with a gesture. The men acted like they were following his wishes, but they did not let him out of their sight, since the order they received was too precise: their lives depended on the Exile not losing his.
The beauty of the month of April in Prinkipo barely affected him as he, followed by Maya, went down the dune that ended on the coast. He asked himself: What agony could grip the brain of a sensitive and effusive man like Mayakovsky to make him voluntarily decline the aroma of the stew, the magic of a sunset, under the gaze of feminine charms, to shut himself up in the irreversible silence of death? And he walked along the shore to observe his dog’s elegant trot, a gift of nature that also seemed offensively harmonious.
Three years earlier, when they were on the verge of banishing him from Moscow and his good friend Yoffe had shot himself in the hopes that his act would cause a commotion capable of moving the party’s conscience and preventing the catastrophic expulsion of Lev Davidovich and his comrades, he had thought that the drama of the act made sense in the political struggle, even though he didn’t approve of such an exit. But the news he had recently read had shaken him due to the magnitude of the mental castration enclosed in its message. How far had mediocrity and perversion gone for the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—Mayakovsky of all people—to decide to evade its tentacles by taking his own life? Today’s petrified crap that so alarmed the poet in his final verses, had it overcome him to the point of suicide? The official note drafted in Moscow could not have been more offensive to the memory of the artist who had fought for a new and revolutionary art with the most enthusiasm, the one who had, with the most fervor, handed over to the spirit of a completely new society his poetry laden with screams, chaos, broken harmonies, and triumphant slogans; the one who had most insisted on resisting, on withstanding, the suspicions and pressures with which the bureaucracy besieged the Soviet intelligentsia. The note spoke of a “decadent feeling of personal failure,” and since in the rhetoric implanted in the country the word “decadence” was applied to bourgeois art, society, and life, by making the failure “personal,” they were reaffirming with calculated cruelty that individual condition that could only exist in the bourgeois artist that, they usually said, every creator always carries within, like original sin, no matter how revolutionary he claims he is. The death of the writer, they clarified, didn’t have anything to do with his “social and literary activities,” as if it were possible to separate Mayakovsky from actions that were no more and no less than his very way of breathing.
Something all too malignant and repellent had to have been unleashed in Soviet society if its most fervent spokespeople were beginning to shoot bullets into their own hearts, disgusted before the nausea caused by
4
“Today’s petrified crap . . .” Lev Davidovich threw the newspaper against the wall and left his study. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the scent of goat stew that Natalia was preparing for dinner, and that appetizing aroma seemed obscene. Behind his desk he contemplated the beautiful Sara Weber, who was typing with a speed that at that moment seemed automatic, definitively inhuman. He crossed the door to the barren garden and the Turkish policemen smiled at him, willing to follow him, and he stopped them with a gesture. The men acted like they were following his wishes, but they did not let him out of their sight, since the order they received was too precise: their lives depended on the Exile not losing his.
The beauty of the month of April in Prinkipo barely affected him as he, followed by Maya, went down the dune that ended on the coast. He asked himself: What agony could grip the brain of a sensitive and effusive man like Mayakovsky to make him voluntarily decline the aroma of the stew, the magic of a sunset, under the gaze of feminine charms, to shut himself up in the irreversible silence of death? And he walked along the shore to observe his dog’s elegant trot, a gift of nature that also seemed offensively harmonious.
Three years earlier, when they were on the verge of banishing him from Moscow and his good friend Yoffe had shot himself in the hopes that his act would cause a commotion capable of moving the party’s conscience and preventing the catastrophic expulsion of Lev Davidovich and his comrades, he had thought that the drama of the act made sense in the political struggle, even though he didn’t approve of such an exit. But the news he had recently read had shaken him due to the magnitude of the mental castration enclosed in its message. How far had mediocrity and perversion gone for the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—Mayakovsky of all people—to decide to evade its tentacles by taking his own life? Today’s petrified crap that so alarmed the poet in his final verses, had it overcome him to the point of suicide? The official note drafted in Moscow could not have been more offensive to the memory of the artist who had fought for a new and revolutionary art with the most enthusiasm, the one who had, with the most fervor, handed over to the spirit of a completely new society his poetry laden with screams, chaos, broken harmonies, and triumphant slogans; the one who had most insisted on resisting, on withstanding, the suspicions and pressures with which the bureaucracy besieged the Soviet intelligentsia. The note spoke of a “decadent feeling of personal failure,” and since in the rhetoric implanted in the country the word “decadence” was applied to bourgeois art, society, and life, by making the failure “personal,” they were reaffirming with calculated cruelty that individual condition that could only exist in the bourgeois artist that, they usually said, every creator always carries within, like original sin, no matter how revolutionary he claims he is. The death of the writer, they clarified, didn’t have anything to do with his “social and literary activities,” as if it were possible to separate Mayakovsky from actions that were no more and no less than his very way of breathing.
Something all too malignant and repellent had to have been unleashed in Soviet society if its most fervent spokespeople were beginning to shoot bullets into their own hearts, disgusted before the nausea caused by
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